In article <ghenE3yoEM.HLp@netcom.com>, Shrisha Rao <shrao@nyx.net> wrote:>Whether he did or not is quite irrelevant actually. It is actually>quite true that Vyaasa Tiirtha did have students who learned only>Advaita from him, and that he did not try to "convert" them, etc., but>taught them their own doctrine very well. (Even in this century,>Anantakrishna Shastri, a committed Advaitin, praised Vyaasa Tiirtha's>presentation of Advaita very highly, and even said that it was a very>thorough, accurate, and concise presentation of the material covered>in Advaitic texts before Vyaasa Tiirtha's time.) But if that is the>case, then the claimed "link" must be called a hoax.

Actually, I have not seen any suffix associated with the person called
"Lakshmipati", so I am not even sure if he was formally a sannyasi. In
any case, I don't think it has ever been claimed that Vyaasa Tiirtha
gave sannyas ordination into an Advaita order, only that he gave
spiritual initiation of some sort to Lakshmipati and that through the
latter, some of his teachings were known to monks elsewhere initiated
(either previously or later) as "Puri"s who were the preceptors of
Krishna Chaitanya. BNK Sharma also acknowledges (in the end of one of
the _History of the..._ chapters on Vyaasa Tiirtha) that Vyaasa
Tiirtha's influence reached remote Bengal within his own time.

>For such>students were *only* brahmachArii-s and grhastha-s. There is no>record of, and it is not known that, Vyaasa Tiirtha ordained an>Advaitin to become an Advaitin monk, etc. That sort of thing doesn't>happen with anybody, in fact, and if someone had so much as merely>received mantropadesha from Vyaasa Tiirtha, they would at least for>the purposes of that mantra have to consider Vyaasa Tiirtha's lineage>as their own.

I think the last sentence sufficiently explains, then, why Gaudiya
Vaishnavas list gurus by mantropadesha and not by sannyas ordination
(even if they preferred the latter, it would not be possible in many
cases) and why Vyaasa Tiirtha is considered a preceptor even if he did
not ordain Lakshmipati, Madhavendra Puri, etc as sannyasis.